Heroes of Might and Magic: Quest for the DragonBone Staff

While only a few publishers have braved converting realtime strategies and strategy games on consoles, there is always another new guy figuring on how to make it finally work. Eidos, Westwood Studios, Virgin Studios, EA and a slew of other publishers have tried it but the formula just doesn't work right on consoles. For one, there is never any online or LAN play, and the controls never seemed to be have been mapped right on the Dual Shocks. That and, at least in the past, the PlayStation's long load times and low resolution graphics created a slow, drawn out feeling that didn't fit the bill.

What's clever about 3DO's re-creation of Heroes of Might and Magic on PlayStation 2 is that it's not really a realtime strategy nor is it an RPG or a strategy/RPG. Not anymore, anyway. The elements that make up those kinds of games are here, but when it comes down to it, Heroes is so stripped down from its PC brethren that it's now more like an action-adventure game with a few bits of RPG and strategy elements thrown in for good measure. The parts are still there, but the presentation, depth, and delivery are different.

I say clever because it's a deceptively fun game in its current form. Heroes distills the great battle sequences from the PC version and delivers them in a fun, relatively deep game that's good looking, moderately fast, and that doesn't falter particularly badly in one area. There are fewer things to do, but those that you experience are good.

Gameplay What we have here is a stripped down strategy-RPG game with almost no strategy left in it, and very little role-playing to make much of a difference. Usually, a PC game with these qualities on a PS2 is lucky to get the happy touch we're sprinkling on it today, but Heroes is still quite enthralling.

Players start by choosing one of four characters and then venture off into the landscape to find the Dragonbone Staff. Why do you need it? It's not because of money, it's because you're altruistic (and you thought you didn't have a good bone in your body...). The king has swallowed a deadly poison and the only thing that can save him is an ancient artifact, the Dragonbone Staff, which is believed to be the most powerful healing device ever. While this would normally be a cinch to retrieve, the map that leads to it has been stolen from one of the most evil creatures in the country, the evil Wyrm-Dragon Malazak, who also is racing to retrieve the staff. If you find it and defeat Malazak, you may even become a hero in the process.

With a top-down look of the countryside, players trot on their horse from forest to glen to village to campsite searching for better armies, greater quantities of treasure, more powerful magic, and ultimately to muster enough courage and power to fight Malazak itself. Encountering enemies occurs in two ways. Random varieties of enemies wander the countryside, and 99% of the time they're eager to fight. You also may lay siege on a castle, if you have the proper tools and the army to win it.

Once you encounter the enemy, a loading screen brings up a grid-based patch of land on which the enemies line up on one side, and your army lines the other. Fights occur with manual or auto-combat, though auto-combat isn't recommended, and players fight in turn-based battles, with each attacked character given the chance to counter attack. The more fights you win with a good ratio of living versus the enemy's dead, the higher your experience points. To earn money to pay soldiers, you explore and find treasure on the top-down map, earn it in castle sieges, and take on contracts for villains and by defeat them in their castles. Renting a ship speeds things up, besides being necessary.

What New World Computing and 3DO have done to make Heroes work well on the PS2 is to make good use of the shoulder buttons, add 3D models into the battles, and provide fully changeable camera angles during battles. While scouring the landscape, the R1 and R2 buttons enable you to see the continent map (given you've found the pieces) and see which Villain contract you have recently picked up. L1 and L2 display the character and the army stats. Encountering battles requires a moderately bearable load time and switching to the menus is fast. All attacks are done by using X.

Even though the normally enormous cast of creatures in Might and Magic isn't present, a good deal of good-looking polygonal characters is present. Players rank staff their armies with anyone, trolls, knights, nomads, elves, dwarves, or ghosts. With 25 types in the game, the variety is still satisfying, especially because their models are good looking and well textured. The list includes five types of dwellings from which players can find them, King Argus' Castle, the plains, the forests, dungeons, and hills. The total creature list features: Militia, Archers, Pikemen, Cavalry, and Knights from King Argus' Castle; Peasants, Wolves, Nomads, Lizardmen, and Archmages from the Plains; Sprites, Troglodytes, Elves, Forest Trolls and Druids from the Forests; Skeletons, Zombies, Ghosts, Vampires, and Demons from Dungeons; and Orcs, Dwarves, Ogres, Giants and Dragons from the Hills.

Normally, mixing different kinds of soldiers, such as for instance, the classic enemies, elves and dwarves, lowers the morale of the other kind of soldier. The same goes for Knights and say, Trolls. These kinds of guys just loathe each other. While morale is definitely affected by mixing different kinds in this PS2 version, it doesn't have a tremendous affect on your battles until you're fighting a seriously deep, deadly army.

While the PC skeleton of Heroes of Might and Magic is definitely still intact, several aspects have simplified and sped up the game. Resource management is stripped down to nil. Resources, such as treasure, artifacts, and armor can now be found on the top-down map and are added to your purse of gold (or correct body part), and have nothing to do with your castles or any larger aspect of your campaign. So, no management is required to, say, continue seeking materials or resources for your castles. The only real management of resources is to keep the armies funded, and for what it's worth, this can be difficult at times. But it's certainly not complicated or sophisticated. But the act of managing your castles is almost completely diminished.

Castles are handled differently too. Instead of building towns into castles, or managing towns with resources, once a castle is taken over, it is merely garrisoned and left to stand on its own. Instead of earning leadership skills through winning battles, this version enables you to do it differently. Leadership skills are increased by choosing to delegate treasure to your armies during scouting sessions, instead of taking it for yourself. Yet another difference is the game's time factor. With the exception of specific missions in a campaign, there is no time limit in the PC games of the same name. Also, you could only move a limited amount of steps. But here, you move as much as desired, as far as you want, but time is limited. You have a certain amount of time before the poisoned king's body gives up, and the Dragonbone Staff is the only artifact that can save him. So the game is sped up.

Graphics Upon laying eyes on this game, nothing in particular hit this gamer's internal Graphic Tart button, nor was the Ugly button smashed unwittingly. The graphics in this game are good, but not great. For instance, the minimal amount of polygons used on the over-maps makes most of the environments smoothed out, rounded, and lacking in major detail. More precisely, they're overly simplistic. Yet, they are high resolution, polygonal, and detailed enough in textures not to throw somebody, like say me, into a fit.

What does please the eyes, however, is the character models. Since the PC versions are all in 2D, the characters are comprised of sprites. Here, they're in full 3D, and pretty. The Pixies are colorful and use an effective-looking transparency effect in the wings that is pleasing. The wolf models are accurate and convincing. In fact the more time spent looking at the character models, the more one realizes that the best graphic aspect of the game is every single creature in the game. Pretty much all of the models are good looking in their own particular way. On the other hand, the landscapes are simplistically drawn with polygonal forests, mountains, rivers, lakes, and deserts, and castles, towns and campsites are simply crafted, too. It seems to me that the model artists should have had a few more stern talks with the background artists... Other than those few points, there is very little else to talk about...except the CG. 3DO has been working on its CG movies, and the opening and closing movies in Heroes are quite dazzling in many respects, such as choreography and emotional character expressions. The old man who tells the opening story shows a tremendous amount of detail that comes our particularly well when expressing himself. Other than his hair implants, he's quite enjoyable to watch.

Sound The central aspects of Heroes' sounds are located in two areas, the fights and the old-fashioned Arthurian music. In the fights, players cast spells or hit, strike or bite each other, and they resulting noises are repeated often. Grunts, moans, etc. strike your ear, and very soon, they become quite repetitive. Strangely enough sometimes, elves will make an incredible low grunt, that doesn't sound like it should be coming from them, and archers and even elf archers oddly grunt lowly when sending arrows through the air. With these couple of exceptions in mind, the fighting sounds do their job adequately. The music plays a very minor role in Heroes, luckily it's not horrible.

The Verdict

Strangely enough, 3DO itself primed me perfectly to believe that like Heroes of Might and Magic was bunk. We never received a playable preview and after we saw the initial demo it would be the last we heard of the game, until it shipped. After a few hours of Heroes of Might and Magic, however, I started thoroughly enjoying the game. Each new quest for a castle and major battles against a powerful army would bring cheers and high fives from my son and myself. The bigger and more powerful the enemies, the more I explored, built armies, and fought for experience points. If there is one fault I have with this game it's that the game really gets good about four hours into it. It's just too slow in the beginning.

Heroes is different from the PC version, no doubt. The kind of slightly more sophisticated complexities of that version are lost in this action-oriented interpretation, yet the core of the game, gaining experience points and smartly out-battling the computer AI, is still very much intact, and as fun as ever.

As long as you know that you're getting a slightly dumbed-down, sped-up version of the PC game, with a few less monsters and less resources to manage -- but you like turn-based battles with Dungeons and Dragons-style monsters -- you will like the PS2 version of Heroes of Might and Magic.

IGN Ratings for Heroes of Might and Magic: Quest for the DragonBone Staff (PS2)